I remember interviewing someone once that claimed to have 200 direct reports. I was really blunt and said "nobody has 200 direct reports".
They assured me that they did. So I grilled them on the mechanics of it.
If you had biweekly 1x1s with all of your DRs, you would have to do 100 per week. If 1-on-1s were your fulltime job you could at most do 80 per week (2 per hour x 40 hrs). Thats just rotating through 1x1s. That's not doing anything else.
He claimed "team leads" did 1x1s, which is fine, but its hard to call them a direct report if you're not even aware of their daily work. Theres just no way you can adequately manage 200 people. As mentioned above, you are just a glorified HR person, you're no longer in engineering.
I would never hire a manager below Director level that isn't themselves an individual contributor. I know its possible to have that but I wouldnt hire it, because we expect IC on our teams.
I’ve heard of companies where hundreds of people officially report to person X but there are “mentors” with 3-5 mentees that seem an awful lot like other company’s mangers. Not sure what the point is exactly.
I mean manager has at least some power, 'mentors' or 'leads' - don't. At current org. we have ~20 ICs in the department and one manager, there are clearly 3, maybe 4 folks who are more senior in experience and more influential, but no, no one perceive them as managers.
Given the grandparent was talking about Bytedance, perhaps you're the floor supervisor for dozens of disposable people watching reported or flagged content to identify porn, violence, etc. on TikTok - disposable because depending on what sort of banned content actually gets posted, you might have a lot of mental trauma and burnout that the company would really rather just replace people than deal with.
You’re effectively either a recruiter or procurement.